[Footnote 13: This image is taken from Ovid's elegy on the death of
Tibullus, Amor. iii. 9. 6:
Ecce! puer Veneris fert eversamque pharetram,
Et fractos arcus, et sine luce facem.--WAKEFIELD.
Ovid copied Bion. Idyl. 1. The Greek poet represents the Loves as
trampling upon their bows and arrows, and breaking their quivers in the
first paroxysm of their grief for Adonis. In place of this natural burst
of uncontrollable sorrow, the shepherd, in Pope, invokes the Loves to
break their bows at his instigation. When their darts are said in the
next line to be henceforth useless, the sense must be that nobody would
love any woman again since Mrs. Tempest was dead. Such hyperboles can
neither touch the heart nor gratify the understanding. The Pastorals
were verse exercises in which every pretence to real emotion was laid
aside, for Pope was not even acquainted with the lady of whom he utters
these extravagances.]
[Footnote 14: This is imitated from Walsh's Pastoral on the death of
Mrs. Tempest in Dryden's Miscellanies, vol. v. p. 323:
Now shepherds! now lament, and now deplore!
Delia is dead, and beauty is no more.--WAKEFIELD.
Congreve's Mourning Muse of Alexis:
All nature mourns; the floods and rocks deplore
And cry with me, Pastora is no more.]
[Footnote 15: Originally thus in the MS.
'Tis done, and nature's changed since you are gone;
Behold the clouds have put their mourning on.--WARBURTON.
This low conceit, which our poet abandoned for the present reading, was
borrowed from Oldham's version of the elegy of Moschus:
For thee, dear swain, for thee, his much-loved son,
Does Phoebus clouds of mourning black put on.--WAKEFIELD.
When Pope submitted the rejected and the adopted reading to Walsh, the
critic replied, "_Clouds put on mourning_ is too conceited for pastoral.
The second is better, and _the thick_ or _the dark_ I like better than
_sable_." The last verse of the couplet in the text was then